Don’t Look Away

A mom who let her 8-month-old twins wait in the car with the windows down for 10 minutes has been released on a $25,000 bond. She is now subject to electronic home monitoring, which means she has to wear the same ankle bracelet used by prisoners on work-release.

“An Alsip [Illinois] woman was arrested after she left her infant twins alone in a car while she went to register her older child for school,” reports Palos Patch. “Sarah Laveille, 28, appeared before Cook County Judge Peter Felice on two misdemeanor counts of child endangerment.”

The article notes that one of the babies was crying.

As the assistant public defender pointed out, the car was within Laveille’s sight “at all times.” So the mom was being responsible, signing one kid up for school and keeping an eye on the other two, but that didn’t matter.

Also immaterial, apparently, is that far more children lose their lives in parking lots than while waiting in cars. Of the 30 to 40 kids who do die in parked cars each year, 80 percent were either forgotten there for hours or got into the car on their own and weren’t found until it was too late. The number who die during a 10-minute errand seems to be zero.